The Employee: A Political History by Jean-Christian Vinel (review)

Jean-Christian Vinel’s highly informative book, The Employee: A Political History, is perhaps best understood as a legal history set within long-term political currents. Of late, these have partially undone social norms established during the middle decades of the twentieth century. The United States’ legal system was originally crafted with small-scale entrepreneurs and farmers in mind in order to provide them with maximum economic flexibility and political independence. Market transactions were a key consideration for the judicial doctrine of equality between equals. Such thinking was less appropriate for arrangements between employees and employers, and as Vinel points out, it wasn’t until late in the 1800s that the judiciary replaced its emphasis on master-servant relations with a recognition that the factory system had come to dominate the economy. Working conditions became a matter to be regulated by the political authorities, but only when the judiciary approved. A tortuous history ensued, not dissimilar to the field of economics in which reality also continually impinges upon the abstract principles to which the discipline is dedicated.

The courts had a long history of striking down progressive legislation—the eight-hour day, limits on the working day for women and minors, bans on “yellow dog” contracts that obliged employees to forego unions, and more. Long, protracted legal campaigns were needed to readjust the judiciary, with a piecemeal enactment of measures that better suited the economic and social transformations brought about by the industrial system. As Vinel emphasizes, the legal system proved to be both malleable and inherently conservative.

But who constitutes an employee? This was the critical issue over which employers and progressives squared off, with union leaders often quite ambivalent about the outcome. If workers were somehow different from servants, what about factory foremen, supervisors, and managers? Should they too be allowed to form unions and bargain collectively? The decidedly class-conscious business world sought to separate supervisors and managers, lest they side with the workforce rather than carry out management’s prerogatives. Wasn’t a unionized supervisory force, according to business owners, an inherent conflict of interest? Much of Vinel’s book is devoted to the campaigns in the late 1940s and then again from the 1970s until the present to expand the definition of supervisory work.

These discussions took on a heightened relevance because of the rapidly expanding white-collar workforce. Vinel estimates that one-third of today’s employees consists of the “salaried semiprofessional or professional who brings the expertise necessary to complete a task and uses his or her knowledge to direct the manner in which other employees will accomplish it” (197). He adds: “In the modern workplace there is no longer a sharp divide between the task of conception and the task of execution” (230). The legal battles over nurses, whose role in the healthcare system has grown alongside the rapid development of privately-owned healthcare institutions, is accorded special attention by Vinel.

What the law giveth, the law can also taketh away. Lately, it mostly rescinds the progressive measures that characterized the mid-twentieth century. Emboldened by regressive legal decisions over the subsequent half century, the political system is now helping to dismantle the system of collective bargaining and legal protections that have characterized a substantial part of the work world, just as it is also helping to dismantle the achievements of the civil rights and women’s movements of that same era. For Vinel, the recent trend connotes a liberalism betrayed and a democracy denied. But one need not accept this premise of a paradise lost in order to recognize the many merits of Vinel’s thesis and historical account.